After my 11 miler last week, I started to have a sort of weird inkling of pain in my left calf. It didn’t hurt while running, but if I moved my leg in a certain way, a mild pain would shoot up my leg to my hip.

On Tuesday’s run, it didn’t really bother me. This was my first treadmill run of the season, which gave me some shin splints when I started, but they went away, and I felt mostly fine for the rest of the run. Wednesday’s run with East Nasty went really well.

On Saturday, I wasn’t feeling great. My leg felt about the same, but I was coming down with a cold (thanks, Jonathan) and was maybe a little hungover from my birthday party the night before. So I took it slow and didn’t push. Yet when I was done, I was limping.

As Saturday went on, my leg started to feel better and I was able to walk normally again. I went back and forth on if I should rest or do my long run on Sunday. Ultimately I decided to go for it, but just take it easy.

It was the hardest ever.

It felt like 50 pound weights were attached to each leg. I was only doing 2:1 intervals, but it was everything I could do to make it through each 2 minutes of running. While walking I felt fine, but running was absolute torture. I called it quits at three miles and figured it would benefit me more to rest than to push myself through 12 torturous miles and end up in more pain.

So that’s where I am right now. I’m going to take a few days (maybe all the way up till the weekend, we’ll see) and RICE my left leg until it feels better. There’s still several weeks before the half, so I think early intervention will mean that I should still be able to run it.

This is the first entire week this year where I did not run at all. Sigh.

My foot was doing better. Then it started hurting again on Thursday night. This forced me to make the difficult decision to not run the Rudolph’s Red Nose 5k on Friday evening. My first DNS. I was very mopey and bummed out all night. My only consolation is that it rained. It was 60 degrees, though, so it wasn’t much of a consolation.

Of course, it felt better over the weekend, even after walking in heeled boots and dancing all night on Saturday.

We clean up nice.

And, by the time I finally saw the doctor on Tuesday, I couldn’t tell that it was ever hurt to begin with. He couldn’t find anything wrong and told me I could keep running.

My foot apparently had some conspiracy to make sure I didn’t run that 5k.

So, you may be wondering how this will set me back in my training. The good news is that it is very early in training, and I had multiple 10+ mile long runs planned, so I can just cut down my long run mileage each week a little without issue. The second is that it’s not a huge deal if I don’t reach my goal at Tom King in March because I have the Kentucky Derby race in April as well.

Thursday was fairly busy. We had Thanksgiving with my family in Clarksville for lunch, then Thanksgiving with Jonathan’s family for dinner. So. Much. Food.

On Friday, we got up early and went to the park to run. It was cold. Like below freezing. I managed to get in four miles and also managed to lose my car keys. Yes, I forgot to zip my jacket pocket. Yes, this has happened before (actually, you’ll read about that in my Hammer Down recap that I haven’t posted yet).

That afternoon, my mom came down to Nashville to take me birthday shopping, like we do every year. I got lots of cute new Anthropologie clothes, including the much-needed new jeans that I mentioned I needed like three months ago. I had to go down two sizes!

Jonathan’s friend Marc and his girlfriend were visiting from Ohio, so we went out to Five Points Pizza with them on Friday night. Five Points is my third favorite pizza in town (behind Mellow Mushroom and House of Pizza), but we had their T-Rex pie that night, and it was so so so so good. I hardly ever get anything other than just pepperoni and cheese, but I was in a sausage mood and so glad I was. I also ate way too much and could barely move.

On Saturday, we headed downtown to watch the Ohio State game. I was very good and didn’t drink anything at the bar so that I would be able to run properly later. I did, perhaps, eat too much chips and queso. Like to the point where I don’t want to see queso for awhile, and I love queso.

When I finally got to the park that afternoon, I was feeling pretty sluggish. I don’t know if my form was off because I was tired or what happened, but a little over three miles in and my left foot started hurting. I stopped to walk, but that hurt too. I hobbled back to the car.

When I got back to the apartment, I started googling (of course). It hurt pretty bad if you pressed on this one specific area on the side of my foot, so I was convinced I had a stress fracture on my fifth metatarsal. We had a Preds game to go to, though, so I hobbled my way around downtown for the rest of the night. (I know, smart.)

Sorry my foot needs lotion, but here is where it hurt.

My foot was still hurting on Sunday, so I didn’t do my long run. We all went out for breakfast at Cracker Barrel and then Jonathan and I had a very lazy day trying to recover from all the social interaction (clearly, we are both introverts).

I was not ready for work on Monday.

The good news is that my car keys were found! As was my glove I lost from the same pocket while volunteering last weekend! And my foot seems to be miraculously healing itself! At least, I don’t think it’s fractured. I may still try to run the Rudolph Run this Friday. We will see.

I have now done two runs in a row of three miles or greater where I have had no pain in my right knee. I am cautiously optimistic that maybe whatever was wrong has finally healed.

What I Have Done

Strength work! I’ve tried to do this every day, but things come up (Bonnaroo, I’m looking at you) and I don’t always. But some is better than none!

Limited my running to three days per week. I noticed the knee would start hurting sooner in the run if I ran two days in a row, so I decided to only do three runs a week (with at least one day of recovery between each) until I noticed some improvement. As soon as I start being able to manage higher mileage on those days, I will increase back up to four days per week and see how that goes for a while. I have no plans to go back to five per week at this time.

Ceased running within half a mile of feeling pain. I didn’t want to be stupid and make it worse by trying to run through it (not that I really could after a certain point). This is why I haven’t really done any running longer than 3.5 miles or so in the past month, except the five mile race.

What I Need to Do

Keep strength training! I have a tendency to stop as soon as my injuries go away, which is probably why I keep getting injured. (Duh…)

Physical therapy? I’m still contemplating going to physical therapy, just so someone can actually tell me if something is improving and to watch me run or do my strength work and let me know how I can improve.